For a discussion about why “Other” is problematic as a category, see Sarah Dopp’s piece from November, 2010 “Gender is a Text Field” (Diaspora, backstory, and context). She’s much smarter than I am about gender and identity, so I’ll point you there.

I, however, question the need to ask for a user’s gender at all. As Munroe said in his Google+ post:

They also (obviously) want to know more about you so they can serve ads; advertisers care about gender. But again, that’s no reason to make gender public.

Identity is a multi-faceted thing. One part of a person’s identity may well be subsumed or tempered by another aspect of it. Aside from perhaps personals ads, is there a reason to collect it at all?

By demographics, I am a married, college-educated, employed, black woman in my mid-30s. Those demographic datapoints suggest that I would care about working mother issues, Tyler Perry, and church. Ads served to me based on those assumptions, however, would miss their target. I am a child-free atheist and quite intent on remaining so. And no, I don’t like Tyler Perry.

About the only thing a gender field tells you is whether a person identifies as male, female, or neither. But if advertisers insist that they need to know gender so they can misfire ads, I propose using either or both of the following strategies:

• Make gender a text field and use taxonomy or heuristics to guess gender
• Provide a preferred pronoun field

Make gender a text field and use taxonomy or heuristics to guess gender

It’s a simple idea: put a text input field in the user interface. Users can enter what they wish. Then using a list of something gendered — male and female words (“dude” / “dudette”), names, perhaps closest connections — we can guess at the gender of the user in question.

Of course, this approach is problematic in that it is imprecise. Techie and tomboyish women may be misidentified as male. But I suspect such misidentification would actually make ads more relevant to those women.

Provide a preferred pronoun field

Even better: let the user set the pronoun he or she or ze or zir prefers. This settles questions such as those faced by xkcd where a bot or user interface needs to be grammatically correct. But it is not necessarily a definitive statment about gender.

And again: give users the option to make that data public, private, or leave it out altogether.

(Via The Mary Sue)

*Google has changed this (or will soon).

“The way I make sense of that is that women, for better or worse, live their lives with this idea that they might experience sexual assault at some point. There are public models of how to recover from rape. Men don’t have any expectation that this might happen to them. It’s very difficult to figure out how those experiences fit into your sense of self as a man.”

That’s VA psychologist Amy Street in a Newsweek piece about male-on-male rape in the military.

A law against spousal rape. A law against spousal murder. A paycheck of her own. And egalitarian marriage. Once women got political power, they insisted on being protected by the ordinary privileges of citizens of a modern democratic society rather than a husband fenced in by the medieval kind of marriage to which Douthat and Schulman would return. Uppity women changed marriage a lot. If they hadn’t, why would any gay or lesbian person want a share in it?

That’s the last paragraph of Linda Hirshman’s Slate piece, The Damsels Demur. In it, she applies the smack down to conservative columnists Ross Douthat and Sam Schulman and their limp defenses of heterosexual marriage.

Big Freedia and Galactic at the Fillmore from Big Freedia on Vimeo.

As far back as the ’40s and ’50s, it was a really popular thing. Gay performers have been celebrated forever in New Orleans black culture. Not to mention that in New Orleans there’s the tradition of masking, mummers, carnival, all the weird identity inversion. There’s just something in the culture that’s a lot more lax about gender identity and fanciness. I don’t want to say that the black community in New Orleans is much more accepting of the average, run-of-the-mill gay Joe. But they’re definitely much more accepting of gay people who get up and perform their gayness on a stage.

And:

When Freedia or Nobby’s singing superaggressive, sexual lyrics about bad boyfriends or whatever, there’s something about being able to be the ‘I’ in the sentence. That’s not to say that women can’t like the more misogynistic music too. I like it — some of it’s good music. But it’s tough to sing along about bitches and hos when you’re a girl. When you identify with Freedia, you’re the agent of all this aggressive sexuality instead of its object.

So says writer Alison Fensterstock in New Orleans’s Gender-Bending Rap in the New York Times Magazine. The piece is about New Orleans bounce, and its variant known as “sissy bounce,” a term that Fensterstock reluctantly takes credit for coining.

So we have queer men as a vehicle for heterosexual women to express aggressive sexuality in the way heterosexual male rappers do. And we have queer men being unabashedly queer for predominantly heterosexual audiences. What does that say, if anything, about the gender politics of bounce and (cisgendered) women?

(Read through to the end for a hypothesis.)

Sweden had already gone further than many countries have now in relieving working mothers: Children had access to highly subsidized preschools from 12 months and grandparents were offered state-sponsored elderly care. The parent on leave got almost a full salary for a year before returning to a guaranteed job, and both could work six-hour days until children entered school. Female employment rates and birth rates had surged to be among the highest in the developed world.

If you want women to achieve economic and political parity with men and also raise children, you have to create and enforce policies that support such a thing. Otherwise the choice is — as we see in the U.S. — between gender discrimination or low population growth.

Our work must be not just about marriage equality, it should also be about equal marriages, and about equal rights and security for those who opt out of marriage altogether.

From Melissa Harris-Lacewell‘s post Reflections on Marriage (via Twanna).

Yes.

Read the whole thing. Harris-Lacewell captures most of my fears and concerns about marriage and about getting married.

And in the absence of alternative models of masculinity, many low-income men will compensate for their lack of respect and resources by cultivating a hypermasculine identity that scorns traditional definitions of responsible manhood.

Stephanie Coontz, in “For Women, Redefining Marriage Material: The Good and the Bad” on the New York Times’ Room for Debate blog.

Still, participants didn’t merely exhibit a preference for thin figures and indifference to obese ones — they showed active dislike toward these theoretically obese. That finding, while regrettable, is enlightening.

From A Fatter Phobia at Miller-McCune.

It’s not clear from the Miller-McCune piece whether or how this varies by race and gender. For example, previous studies (I’m too lazy to find them) have shown that weight negatively affects white women’s earnings more than it affects those of black men and women. I wonder if the same holds true here. Do people revile obese black people any more than they revile obese white people? Do they revile obese black people more than they revile black people in general?

With just one swing of a golf club, Tiger Woods’s wife, Elin, has shattered, or at least cracked, the stereotype of the angry and uncontrollable black woman. I, along with what I suspect to be countless other black women, would like to thank her. Not that I condone violence against anyone, but for far too many years black men — particularly successful, high-profile ones — have pointed to the unpredictable temperament of black women as one of the many reasons they so frequently choose to marry outside the race. A couple of weeks ago Elin Nordegren Woods showed them that the rage of a woman scorned knows no color.

Oooh. Allison Samuels went there in her Newsweek piece Hell Hath No Fury Like a Swedish Ex-Model.

Also see: Cecily’s Tiger By The Tail: The Un-Making of the Model Black Man

While I feel a strong personal connection to this day I also know the stories are not my own. I can mourn but also recognize important power differentials that make other trans folks more likely targets of violence. We must avoid using the stories of those killed to advance consciousness raising projects and a political agenda that is about the needs of trans folks with more relative power and privilege. Instead, we need to be continually working to build a politics that centers the voices and needs of those who are most vulnerable, even within already marginalized populations.

A moving essay about gender, identity, class, race and media.

Actor Doyle Reynolds does an amazing job of playing a total of 36 characters in two acts. He skillfully uses changes in voice, body position and gestures to draw each character for the audience. It’s truly an incredible performance.

The Pulitzer Award-winning script is based on playwright Doug Wright’s interviews with and research about von Mahlsdorf and her life. He captures both von Mahlsdorf’s life and the controversy surrounding her receipt of a government medal and involvement with the East German secret police (the Stasi).

Wright leaves the questions surrounding von Mahlsdorf unanswered, but explains why Charlotte is so important to gay history and identity: “I need to believe that a man could survive two of the most repressive regimes the West has ever seen in a pair of heels.” (I think that’s the exact line.)